“I guess I just dropped off. Sorry.”

“You needed a break. Here, let’s put the little guy back with his mama. He’ll keep her mind off what I’m doing.” Tacoma hunkers down and snaps open the cage door, waking the mother wolf. He grins. “Go on. It’s okay.”

Kirsten levers herself up onto her knees, careful to hold her small burden steady, leans forward and gently lays him on the blanket beside his mother. Lightly her nose touches Kirsten’s hand, sniffing, then drops to her pup as she begins to bathe him. Kirsten cannot help herself. She reaches forward and strokes the wolf’s beautifully sculpted head, feeling the brittle dryness of her fur, the papery texture of her skin. “She’ll be okay?” It is all she can do to keep the tears from her voice.

”She’ll be okay. She’s reacting well to the drugs and a steady diet. Come summer we should be able to release them.”

With a start, Kirsten realizes how little she knows about Dakota’s brother. “Are you a vet, too?”

He laughs as he straightens up and begins to fasten the bag of Ringer’s to the drip tube, checking the clamp for proper tension. “I’m an engineer, by education if not trade. Comes in handy from time to time—we’ll be bringing a few of those big wind generators for the Base next week.. They won’t feed us, but at least we’ll have refrigeration and lights. And laundry,” he adds, almost as an afterthought. “Manny’s even tireder than I am of washing his socks in the bathroom sink.”

“That’s enough to earn you years of undying gratitude believe me.” Then, coming back to her question, “I just thought—” she makes a gesture that encompasses the ward, the two wolves, his deftness with the trappings of medicine.

“I know. Lots of people think the same thing. It’s just something that comes from growing up in a big family, on a ranch, though.” Tacoma uncaps the syringe with his teeth and, holding the line steady, begins to inject the medication into the IV. “Good old Penicillin. Can’t beat it. You’re an only child, Kirsten?”

She is taken aback. “Does it show?”

“Not really. It’s just that when there are ten of you, like there are of us, you can change a diaper and give a bottle before the training wheels come off your bike. Same with the cats and dogs and cows and horses. We all learned what to do about colic or a breach birth before we quite figured out how the colt got inside his mama in the first place.”

“That young, huh?” She grins at him.

“Oh, even younger than you can imagine.” He returns the smile, looking again so like his sister that Kirsten’s breath leaves her lungs. ‘There’s some coffee if you’d like—“

“Sergeant! Sergeant Rivers!”

The shout interrupts him, repeated to the pounding of feet in the corridor. Shannon bursts through the door, her face and hair wild, “Sergeant—“

“Bleach!” he barks at her, the Master Sergeant suddenly displacing the charming rancher and the rough-and-ready vet with a vengeance.

Shannon hops in and out of the basin with the speed of a Phillipine bamboo dancer. “Sergeant, it’s your cousin, the Lieutenant. He’s out front—“

But Tacoma is gone before the first sentence is out, Kirsten on his heels.

*

Dark is drawing down as Koda lowers the binoculars from her eyes and nods, satisfied with what she’s seen. The Caresaway Birthing Center is a smallish one-story structure bordered by attractively landscaped grounds that are only now beginning to grow ragged. The facility has two entrances. The rear entrance, for deliveries, is locked from the outside with several lengths of chain and three stout padlocks. The main entrance, at the end of a long, winding pathway, is guarded by a single android bearing a nasty semi-automatic weapon. She briefly considers using Kirsten’s handy little device to gain entry, then discards the idea, not knowing for sure how long it will take to round up the women kept captive inside and not wanting to take the chance of the droids “waking up” in the middle of her evacuation and spraying bullets all over the place.

The minicomp is a comforting weight against her chest, and she finds herself smiling as she thinks back on her parting from Kirsten. The feeling of the kiss still lingers, sparking tiny bits of fire along her nerve endings, like an Independence Day sparkler held in a child’s hand. After hours of thinking about it on the drive up to this place, she still isn’t sure exactly what possessed her to act in such a manner with Kirsten—a woman whose emotional walls are so thick that they likely give the Maginot Line pause. She realizes that if she had stopped to think at that moment, it probably wouldn’t have happened at all. Not because there isn’t an multi-layered attraction there, because there is and it is something she’d admitted to herself quite some time ago.

Perhaps it’s because everything about Kirsten King screams “keep out!” in huge neon letters, and Koda has been conditioned from an early age to respect such signs.

Until that one moment in time where she could no more stop her body’s instinctive actions than she could will her heart to stop beating.

With a soft sigh, she relegates those thoughts to the back of her mind where they’ll need to stay until she sees this task she’s set for herself to full completion.

As she watches, a tall man with thick hair and a bushy moustache exits the facility and begins speaking with the android guarding the entrance. Both look up, guns raised, as a herd of winter-thin deer bound from the woods across the neat grounds in huge, panicked leaps.

It is the distraction Dakota needs, and she leaves her tree-lined shelter, darting around the perimeter of the facility until she reaches the west wall. She presses herself tightly against it, feeling the bricks’ chill seeping through her jacket and shirt. To her right, there is a polarized window standing slightly open. She peers carefully through the small slit, and sees that the room beyond is empty and dark.

Sliding careful fingers into the seam, she eases the window open just enough for her to be able to squeeze through. Then, with a soft grunt, she hefts herself up and over the lip of the window and inside the darkened room, freezing the instant her feet touch the heavily carpeted floor. A moment later, she is moving again, silent as a shadow trailing a running man. At the doorway, she pauses again, then slips through and into the empty hallway beyond.

The blueprints she’d downloaded from the computer firmly in her mind, she slides along the hallway wall until she comes to the next doorway. She can hear the muffled sounds of life within: a pen scratching on a piece of paper, the soft hum of medical equipment monitoring and infusing, the deep relaxed breaths of the sleeping and the drugged. She is visible for no more than an instant as she takes in the scene before ducking back out and melding herself to the wall, processing what she’s seen.

Four beds to the left, only to of them occupied. One male to the right, his human status proclaimed by the barren neck that just peeps above the collar of his starched white labcoat. He sits hunched over a desk, writing in a chart. His sandy blonde hair is mussed and lank. His face sports impressive swelling and bruising along his jawline and the one eye she can see.

Taking in a breath, she slips around the doorway and silently moves behind the doctor, squatting on her haunches as she slips a hand over his mouth. “If you want to live,” she hisses in his ear, “don’t scream. Understand?”

The man nods once, quickly.

“Good. I’m gonna ask you some questions. When I take my hand away, I want you to answer me in a whisper, got it?”

Another nod.

“How many women are in this place?”

“Twelve,” he whispers from between swollen and cracked lips.

“Including these two?”

“Fourteen.”

“How many androids?”

There is a long pause. She can feel the surprise and confusion rolling off him in waves.

“How many?”

“T-two.”

“Including the one guarding the door?”

“Yes.”

“Human males? Excluding yourself?”

“Just one.”

“He do this to you?” she asks, trailing a gentle finger against his lumpy jawline.

He flinches, then nods, shamed.

Her lip lifts in a snarl. “Ok,” Koda nods, satisfied. “Aside from these two, are the others able to travel?”

“Yes.”

“And these two, could they, if it was an emergency?”

“I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Not even if it meant their freedom?”

Another pause. She can feel it as his confusion turns to hope. “I could get them ready.”

“How long?”

“T-twenty minutes?”

“Make it ten and you’ve got a deal.”

“It’ll be done.” A pause. “Who are you?”

“A friend.”

And when he turns around, she is gone.

*

Tacoma bursts from the short corridor into the waiting room, halting so abruptly that Kirsten almost crashes into him. Behind her, Shannon does stumble and steadies herself against Kirsten’s shoulder. “Sorry,” she gasps, just as Tacoma breathes an audible sigh of relief. Over his shoulder, or more properly, around his ribs, Kirsten has a clear view of the parking lot in front of the clinic door. A long-bedded pickup is drawn up in front of the entrance, with the tops of a couple large steel-wire animal carriers showing under the back window and above the fenders. Manny, in civilian jeans and flannel shirt, is easing the tailgate down, one-handed, assisted by the freckle-faced helicopter pilot who joined them on the mad charge across the Cheyenne bridge after the choppers had shot their loads. Andrews, if she remembers correctly, also in mufti.

Kirsten does not know what Tacoma feared, but it is clear that whatever it was, it has not happened. He pushes the door open almost casually. “Yo, Cuz. What you got?”